Rough dirt roads

[old man emu]

Ever wonder how come corrugations form on an unsealed road? Here's a video which explains it. The video is a bit slow to start so advance to 6:30 to miss the fluff.

 

 

[willedoo]

They're awful things; two things I don't miss about out there are corrugations and flies. The worst corrugations I've ever encountered were on the Kintore road after you turn off the Tanami road. From the turnoff it's about 375 klm to Kintore and about 200 klm of that was really bad corrugations with no let up hour after hour. It was the sheer distance of the corrugated section that made it so bad. We had a couple of casualties - one of the towed dongas had some suspension come apart so we had to take the wheel off and chain the axle up. The worst bit was late in the afternoon when a fuel tanker on the back of a body truck split a seam. We off loaded as much fuel as we could into trucks, machines and Toyotas but had to leave the tanker truck there overnight. Moving it would have ruptured it more and been a major fuel spill. With the level lowered, the pressure behind the leak wasn't as bad but it still lost a lot onto the road which the local council wasn't happy about. We borrowed a heap of 44's from a local station and a couple of the blokes came back with the float and a hand pump and offloaded fuel into the drums. They were going all night and into the next day to get all the fuel, about three trips they did.

 

We found the best trucks to handle that rough country were the W series Kenworths. The cabs held up much better than Macks and other makes. You could buy some really good second hand road train rated W series trucks at fairly cheap prices. For the people selling them, they were no longer viable or economical for highway work, but they were still good for many years of desert bashing.

[willedoo]

Thinking in hindsight about the leaking fuel tanker in the above post. They tried everything they had on hand to try and stop the leak which at pressure was a big spray of fuel. After giving it some thought, if we'd had some rubber matting or belting as a bandage and decent sized ratchet straps on hand to hold it, we could have possibly slowed it to a dribble at least. A bit like how Captain Cook and Co. saved the Endeavour off Cooktown.

[Grumpy Old Nasho]

That's a very informative video ... I should send it to my Local Council with a request to fix my unsealed street. In fact, I've heard rumors they will be doing something about it soon before One Nation cracks down on them.

Edited 17 hours ago by Grumpy Old Nasho

[onetrack]

So Pauline is going to set up a whole new level of bureaucratic oversight, something like Trumps DOGE? Let me know how that works in practical terms - it seems like DOGE went out the window long ago, with virtually zero savings.

 

DOGE was shut down 8 mths ahead of schedule, and it no longer exists. Musk claimed DOGE saved US$214B in Govt waste and losses - the reality is, his claims were total BS, DOGE saved nothing in the final washup, and it is reported that overall, DOGE actually cost U.S. taxpayers, by the time the cost of having to rehire important people fired by DOGE operatives, and lawsuits by Govt employees unfairly dismissed, were taken into account.

 

 

 

[willedoo]

14 hours ago, Grumpy Old Nasho said:

That's a very informative video ... I should send it to my Local Council with a request to fix my unsealed street.

Hopefully they'll have the money to fix it. Our council is flat broke to the tune of one billion dollars in the red. They've been spending money like drunken sailors trying to imitate the Gold Coast and now the shite has hit the fan. I'm a bit cynical I suppose, but my guess is higher rates and more potholes before any of the more than 1,000 bludgers sitting behind desks lose their jobs. They have way more sitting on their arse in the offices than they do out in the world doing some work. More than half the rates income goes to paying council staff.

[facthunter]

There's rough roads and Corrugated roads, They are not really the same.  A corrugated road may still have a sound Base and just require a grader at the right time. Nev